On Friday, I posted this, my first diary here - about my intentions to spend Saturday helping the recall petition effort in Wisconsin. In it I promised to report on how it went the next day when I got back. Well, I was a little sick to my stomach when I got back, and it was a lot later than I expected to get back, and I had to fight a little bit with photobucket to get my account set up there, so that's why I didn't get the followup out until today.
Summary: Well, I intended to post a wonderful report of how well it went, but the results were disappointingly small (5 of us managed to get a whopping 7 signatures) and I hope they were not indicative of how the effort overall is going. (They might not be - there were circumstances described below that put these results in perspective). But I can report that the activity was not as difficult as my shy self expected, and I may do it again (hoping to get a better assignment this time).
(One thing that this has made me think is that I really hope there can be a legal way found to do what this diary recommends, and set up stations near polling booths on April 5th for recall signatures, but I don't know if that might be a problem legally, and if it is, it could be dangerous to do it and thereby "taint" the entire recall effort with something that can be used to legally throw it out. And since there won't be a paper trail of which signatures were gained in this way instead of in other ways, it might throw out all the other signatures too if it's found to be illegal. That's what's making me nervous about that idea.)
Despite the low results our group got, I still think there's value in describing the process so people who haven't done this before can tell how it works and maybe consider doing it themselves too.
Pictures and video below the fold.
The day began at 9:00am at Brittingham Park in Madison, with people gathered outside this pavilion to receive instructions:
I'm only using first names here because I didn't get permission for full disclosure ahead of time.
State Senator Mark Miller was there to give a little speech (warning if you click on this - my little cellphone video had a hard time dealing with the wind, and so you get a lot of wind noise in this video):
Then Nick, our organizer, gave instructions about how to head out and how to organize the carpools. He was the one you had to e-mail to receive instructions on where to go when to meet up and form carpools, who's address is mentioned on the RecallTheRepublican8 website:
My friend Fiona and I ...
...............
... arrived looking for a ride, and found we weren't alone in that - and many others were looking to hook up with total strangers too. We ended up in the van with these nice folks: From left to right: Me, bruce, Mary, and Patty (Fiona not pictured - she's holding the camera).
So we all packed up and started driving the 2.5 hour drive up to Green Bay. They claimed Green Bay was where the most people were needed, so this made some sense. Along the way we chatted and got to know the other strangers in our van, each with their own different story for why they were involved. The conversation drifted around randomly but as can be expected, it kept shifting back to politics and each person offering a new reason to dislike Walker's bill (there's many varied reasons to. It's not all just about unions.)
I admit I was nervous beforehand because I know the Fox cities (Green Bay, Appleton, etc) are very right-leaning (let's remember that this is where Joe McCarthy is from and where the John Birth Society is headquartered)).
After the 2.5 hour drive, we stopped at the Brown Country Democratic Party headquarters - a small generic looking brick office building that you would never realize is a party headquarters were it not for the signs in the windows about the recall. The idea was to send people to the local headquarters in each district where the locals would have a better idea of where to distribute people. We signed in, and got our credentials down, and sat for about a half hour quick training session where we were instructed about some careful rules to follow to keep everything legal, and how to fill in the forms. (They are keeping track of which houses have already been visited, and they want to know the difference between getting an answer of "no" versus the person not being home or not answering the door. People who weren't home can be re-visited in a second pass, but people who already answered "no" might start to get annoyed if you bother them again.) There were also check-off boxes for "moved" and "deceased".
We were told a little bit about the senator that we were trying to recall for this district, Robert Cowles.
We chatted for a bit with this young gentleman behind the counter:
Who mentioned that he was not part of trying to recall Republican Cowels, but that he was involved in the defense against recall for the Democratic senator Dave Hansen from the adjacent district 20, which also covers much of the Green Bay area. Hansen's district covers more of the downtown of Green Bay while Cowles' district is more located in the suburbs around Green Bay.
We asked out of curiosity how the opponent's recall of Hansen was going, and he said it was hard to tell at this point, but that he had heard the republican party was paying its canvassers instead of using in-state volunteers and some were being pretty dodgy about the residency requirements for canvassers (see below) by paying out-of-state canvassers to rent an apartment and live in it for 10 days to establish residency before canvassing.
(I cannot confirm if what he said was true - but if it was that's pretty dodgy, and pretty desperate.)
(residency requirements) - To SIGN a recall petition, you have to be an eligible voter in the district the legislator represents. To merely witness the signatures as a canvasser, you have to merely be an eligible voter in the state of Wisconsin at large (not necessarily in the district you're canvassing for). Establishing residency for 10 days is the minimum requirement to become an eligible voter.
So we were each handed a packet with signature forms, "sorry we missed you but if you want to sign the recall against Cowles here's some locations to do it" sorts of flyers for the no-shows, maps to the neighborhoods to canvas, and lists of addresses and names, organized by even addresses on one sheet and odd addresses on the next, so if people wanted to work a turf in pairs they could separate the sheets and take opposite sides of the street. All of this was put together on clipboards and seemed rather well organized as far as I could tell. We were told we didn't have to do the packets in order so long as we kept track of who we did get to and who we didn't (there where checkboxes for this) and they would pore over the lists later to figure out which houses still needed to be visited.
The organizers handed our group of 5 people 5 different packets that were adjacent to each other because we were all in the same car.
We then found out that our group was being sent out to an area of DePere (a suburb of Green Bay that's upstream along the Fox River) which had already been canvassed once before and this was the second pass. Because of this, we should avoid hitting houses not on the list. If it's not on the list there's a good chance it's because it was already visited and the voters there already gave a signature or already said no.
Our original plan was to park the van in one place and then each of us head off our separate ways to do our individual packets and then head back to the van later. We exchanged cellphone numbers so if one person got done early they could call the rest and let them know. We soon discovered looking at the area and comparing it to our maps (which had no scale on them) that the area was more spread-out than we realized and the plan with us all splitting up and walking wasn't going to work as well as we thought - so we only split into two groups and broke up the pages of our packets to put multiple people on the same packet at the same time.
Patty and Fiona went with their two packets, which were adjacent to each other, while Bruce, Mary, and I did one packet quickly together - we left the other two packets to do after we finished the first three, because the other two packets were a bit further away and impossible to walk to.
Our first group was actually an apartment block. Google maps being what it is, it tends to get apartment complexes in the wrong location on maps because it thinks the house numbers are aligned along the street when they're actually in a recessed private drive. So our google-maps generated maps had us going to the wrong place before we finally figured out where the apartment block was. Apartments, I was told afterward, are the hardest place to canvas because the people move so quickly records can't keep track of them, and people often don't mention their apartment numbers when registering to vote.
I should point out at this point that the list of names and addresses was generated from the registered voter records, which are a matter of public record. That was important to know because there were a few responses where people smelled a conspiracy theory and said, "How did you get my name? How did you know I live here?"
The apartment block was rather slim pickings. Most people were not home, and the few that were were not interested. I could hear the exact same right-wing talking points from every refuser - repeating such mantras as "the cowards fled" and "I fully support his bringing you lazy overpaid bums in line with everyone else." and so on and so forth. I am normally a very argumentative person when faced with someone who's blatantly lying, or gullibly repeating a blatant lie told to them by someone else, but in this case because of the large list of names to go through that didn't seem like a fruitful spending of time - I figured it would be better to get to more people who are already willing to sign, instead of spending a lot of time convincing just one person who might not be convinced anyway. Instead of bothering to correct the talking points I'd just say "Regardless of what your reason is for not wanting to sign, if you don't want to sign I wont take any more of your time and I'll make a mark telling people not to visit you again. Sorry for interrupting your day sir." (I found that telling people that why I was making a mark on a clipboard was to make sure we don't bother them again made them feel more at ease. Before I started doing that people got very anxious about the little tick marks I was making when they would respond and started getting all conspiracy-theory about why the Democrats were keeping tabs on their answers.)
So we finished that packet, which also contained a few streets on it after the apartment complex and came to the following depressing result: In the entire packet we got... one.
One Signature out of about 60 places we tried. (about half were not-at-homes, and half were "no"s.) I was pretty demoralized even though I was the one lucky enough to get the one signature we did get. (Although Bruce and Mary did get a few "I agree with you but I can't sign because I already signed it at the library" responses, which was more encouraging than what I got.)
My one signature was from a man who said his wife had already signed and he was willing to help get "that bastard" out of office, but he hadn't gotten down to sign himself yet and he appreciated the convenience of signing it here.
I almost had gotten another signature from an elderly lady at the apartment block, until I stopped her upon realizing from her talk that she misunderstood and thought I was there to recall Hansen - the Democrat from the neighboring district. As easy as it would have been to just let her sign anyway under that misunderstanding it would have been immensely unethical, so I stopped her and explained again that I was there for Cowles, and that furthermore if she did want to sign a petition to recall Hansen she doesn't live in the right district to do it. Again I heard more of the same right-wing talking points but she was very friendly about them and seemed eager to debate and discuss. Under other circumstances I would have loved to have done so, but again I was living under the misconception that there were a lot more "yeses" out there to be found and that spending a long time with one person wasn't fruitful. If I knew then what I knew now about how small the number of signatures I was going to get was, I would have spent more time talking to her because she did seem willing to listen when I pointed out the discrepancy between what she saw on the news and what I saw with my own eyes about the protests in Madison, and the discrepancy between the Fox news version of how much teachers make versus what I know teachers actually make, and exactly how the numbers were cooked to make that happen.
Well at this time we met up with Fiona and Patty, who themselves had gotten a few signatures but they weren't done with their packets yet because they didn't have three people working on one packet like we did.
They had a story of one house where a man did sign but said, "None of my neighbors are going to know I signed this, right?" Which makes me wonder what sort of social pressures are at work behind that statement.
I joined up with Fiona to help finish her packet while Mary and Bruce went off to do Patty's.
Fiona and I walked up a more major road - one without sidewalks and therefore not nice for pedestrians, and took a few houses - and I got my second and final signature for the day - the only one I actually felt really good about - from a man who was in his driveway trying to decipher the source of a noise in his truck engine when I asked the standard opening question "have you been watching the news about what has been going on in the state capitol the last four weeks with the protests?" I actually got the unexpected answer "no, what has that all been about?". About 5 minutes of conversation later, with me giving a few examples of things I saw personally with my own eyes, and me explaining carefully that a recall petition does not necessarily actually recall the senator but it just triggers a new election right away instead of waiting for the end of his term, so there's a chance for voters to change senators if they want, and he was sold on signing. He said he'd take the time to learn more about the issue, and hasn't decided whether or not to vote against the senator in the actual election, but he doesn't see any harm in having the election happen to find out if people still support him or not.
At this point we regrouped and had 7 signatures. It was still a small number, but we went off to the next subdivision to finish the last two packets. We were running out of time and had to stop at 5pm, as interrupting people during dinner has adverse affects on PR, so we only got through one more packet, and left the final 5th packet untouched for now. The last area we did was an area we knew would be hostile territory - all new houses, all large, with giant SUV's. Here's the photo of that area:
As one might expect, in this area we got zero more signatures, although we did try it did not look like good pickings.
So that was the end of our day. We headed back to the headquarters building and turned in our sheets and talked about the low results we got. They said they sent us out there because it was contiguous territory, and that they had gotten some signatures from that area on the first pass. I remain very worried about this recall effort in this district . I think this senator might be in too strong a Republican district.
A long 2.5 hour drive back home with more talking about the day and the events, and we shook hands and went our separate ways.
While on the one had I am a bit discouraged by the low numbers, on the other hand I finally did get out there and get a chance to see how the mechanisms work for this and how it's all done. And it's always good to meet strangers and join in a cause.